Charlize Theron Smolders and Strips Down For Esquire UK: "It's Nice to Be Not Single"

Charlize Theron opens up to Esquire U.K. in its July 2014 issue about relationships old and new.Credit: Esquire

Charlize Theron, unfiltered. The gorgeous Oscar-winning actress stripped down for the July 2014 issue of Esquire U.K., and dished on her relationships—new (hello Sean Penn!) and old. "It was nice to be single and now it’s nice to be not single," Theron, 38, told the mag.

In images shot by celeb photographer Terry Richardson, the South African-born beauty looks scorching hot on the cover wearing a skintight one-piece featuring a white top and itty bitty black booty shorts with sheer panels. "Life is really good," the Million Ways to Die in the West star said.

"I'm sure some people would be like, 'I would never want to have that life,'" Theron explained of her unmarried status. "That's not necessarily what a lot of women want." The star, instead, has spent the last few years focusing on her son Jackson, 2, and now, a burgeoning romance with Penn.

"I'm just saying, a life is good if it's the life that you want," she dished. "I am living my life in a way that if tomorrow it ended—and I hope not because I have a kid—but if it did, this was the life that I really wanted to live," she said. "But I work at that, you know?"

Indeed, Theron's life has changed dramatically since she adopted Jackson in March 2012. "I was like, "Ah, finally!'" she recalled of meeting her son. When Jackson was just three months old, Theron took him to live in Namibia for a year as she made the film, Mad Max: Fury Road.

"When I originally said yes to the movie, I had just split up from my relationship [with longtime beau Stuart Townsend]," she said. "So, there was a part of me that thought, 'This is what you need to do, you need to go and sit in a desert. I'm going to go to Australia and have a walkabout,'" she added of the film, which was shot in Africa and Australia. "I'm going to find myself. I was excited about it."

The actress cited timing as one reason for the split. "In his defense," she said of the Irish actor, "it was not that he didn't want to have children, it was just something that never worked out." Timing—and fate—have ultimately led the star to her current man.

"I wasn't in any place that I even wanted something like [a relationship]," she reflected of her sudden romance with Penn.

"Then one day you go: Oh, [Jackson's] almost two now, and he has his little activities that he goes to and he's got a bedtime now, and you have more time again. And it's like if you are open to something, if you just let it happen, it will happen. When you least expect it."